BRIDGE LINE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
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Return to the BLHS Home PageIf you know of any other group with rail-oriented or special events you would like us to mention, have them contact us with the details, al lowing sufficient time for us to publicize an event properly! All we ask is that if we promote and help a group, it should reasonably do the same for us.
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We must continue our growth to reach the critical mass necessary to undertake our necessary ambitious projects in the future. Please continue to be on the lookout for members.
Continuing in the proud tradition of D&H firsts, your BLHS was the first rail enthusiast society to have its own "home page" on the Internet. Thus, even the D&H's historical society has made history! About a third of our new members found out about us from that home page.
Welcome aboard this month to:
Return to the BLHS Home Page or Return to The Consist
There is no reward other than the thanks of the membership and, of course, the pride of seeing your work in print. If you want the photos back, please be sure to say so. As for articles....well, we can always use articles!
To put it bluntly...WE NEED YOUR ARTICLES
HO Scale Kits now available to non-BLHS members
The BLHS has a variety of HO scale kits which it is offering for sale to both members and non-members.
The D&H Book Worm
D&H
Color Guide to Freight and Passenger Equipment, by Jim Odell, Jeffrey
Martin, Gardiner Cross and Jack Wright. Published by Morning Sun Books, in
cooperation with – and available through – the BLHS. 8½" x 11", color, 128
pages, hardbound; reviewed by Steve Wagner.
This freshly-minted book is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in the freight and passenger cars used by the Delaware & Hudson from the 1950's through the 1980's. BLHS members Jim Odell, Jeffrey Martin, Gardiner Cross, and Jack Wright have performed an invaluable service by putting the book together, using slides taken by approximately fifty photographers, most of them BLHS members.
This volume provides abundant evidence of the incredible variety of painting and lettering schemes that the D&H used on its equipment. Understandably, given the book's all-color format, rolling stock painted in the 1960's and later is better represented than cars in earlier liveries. There are, for instance, no photos showing the pre-1953 pattern featuring a tiny road name just underneath the D&H reporting marks, sometimes accompanied by the small, circular ``A Century of D&H Anthracite Service'' herald. Only a few shots show the 1953 version, with a small road name and the circular Bridge Line herald. Several photos show the circular herald accompanied by the large, billboard road name; I still think the large name wasn't used until 1956, not 1953. The authors, however, have taught me a lot, notably the dates (months as well as years) in which the D&H painters started and stopped certain practices, such as painting the ends of yellow boxcars yellow instead of black. Most of the photos are so well reproduced that a fanatic can use a good magnifying glass to read a great deal of the data painted on the cars shown.
Practically every sort of steel car the D&H ever used is pictured in this book. The only exceptions I'm aware of are, as noted in the book's introduction, some passenger cars used for excursion service during the Sterzing years. Wooden passenger cars, whose further use in passenger service was forbidden in 1956, are shown only in company work train service. (Volume One of Delaware & Hudson In Color, also from Morning Sun, has several photos of wooden cars still in passenger service.) One wooden boxcar and two converted for company sand service also appear.
The one modern paint scheme I'm sorry not to find in the book is the billboard road name with double shield herald applied in yellow to 50 ft. PS-1 boxcars wholly painted – not just partially repainted – in the Nile green color the Reading had used. I saw at least one such car at Worcester, MA, in the summer of 1977; I saw at least two along the Northeast Corridor in the next year or two. They may have been among the handsomest cars the D&H ever painted, which is really saying something! I just hope I can find my notes showing the cars' numbers; I could kick myself for misplacing them!
I could also kick myself for not having sent the authors one particular slide that my wife took at the mine in Tahawus, since it shows one yellow ilmenite hopper brighter and shinier than the one shown in the book, coupled to one far dirtier than any shown there. Ilmenite is very dirty stuff. It did not, however, burn the paint off the cars that hauled it. That happened, rather, to cars that were loaded at Tahawus with freshly sintered magnetite iron ore, a useful secondary product which was indeed hot when loaded. See Richard Sanders Allen's article on the line north of North Creek, ``Better Late Than Never'', in the January 1959 issue of Trains, which was also reprinted in the June 1962 BLHS Bulletin.
[Pub. Note: Given the scope of the book, and knowing that so many different paint schemes were applied by the Bridge Line's shop forces, it's hard to believe that all schemes could be represented, despite the best efforts of the authors. If they missed a few, it could mean they have another volume planned. Let's hope so; it's a fine book...JB]
Boston & Maine In Color, by Jeremy F. and Jeffrey G. Plant. Morning Sun Books; reviewed by Steve Wagner.
This newly-released book was put together by the Plant brothers, the same railfans who assembled ``Delaware & Hudson In Color, Volume 2''. The authors first encountered the B&M when they were boys in Troy in the Fifties; their personal memories include the ``tin fish'' (originally the Flying Yankee) operating as the Minute Man.
More books have been published about the B&M than about the D&H; nevertheless, no fan of railroading in the Northeast should miss this volume. It provides a splendid selection of color photos of operations on the Bridge Line's long-time primary connection to New England. Steam locos, which operated in regular service on the B&M until 1956, three years after the last D&H steamers ran, are very well represented in the book. So are the B&M's quite disparate diesels, painted in the line's various – and variously weathered – liveries. I love the authors' remark that within a few years of its latest blue paint job a loco had weathered ``like a pair of well-worn jeans''.) Guilford gray and orange locos show up on only two pages near the end of the book; two more pages show commuter trains in two T (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) paint schemes.
Altogether, a first class job.
Ed. Note: Jeremy Plant is also a BLHS member.
If you have any questions about any of the subjects or items in this issue, please feel free to contact the Publications Office, or contact our columnists directly. We are always willing to discuss your interests and concerns, and we try to make ourselves available.
In addition to our regular staff of contributors (see back cover), special thanks this month go to: Friends at Amtrak; Lew Baisden; Doug Barron; Ed Baumgardner; John Conklin; friends at Conrail; Arthur Crouch; Rev. Irving Cummings; friends at D&H/CP/SL&H; Craig Fosdick; Gene Gilchrist; Dan Heffner; Gerald Jones; Jim Odell; David Wallace; and Mark S. Zaleskiewicz.
Our apologies to any contributor and/or helper we may have inadvertently not properly attributed in the confusion.
